Updating firmware on an AirLink (Sierra Wireless) Raven X Cellular Modem

Okay, this probably doesn’t apply to many people because I doubt the user base for these units is very big, but I ran into this issue today. 

Problem

Wanted to upgrade the firmware on an AirLink Raven X Cellular Modem (V4221-S) to the latest since what it had on it was from February 2007.  Appearantly AirLink is now Sierra Wireless (or they bought them… I don’t really care…).  Downloaded release RavenX_EVDOA_4.0.7.001.exe  and ran it from a  laptop connected to the modem via ethernet.  Before reaching the 50% mark it told me “Unable to write the firmware to the modem flash”… how rude! 

Remove Blogger Navigation Bar AND whitespace

Problem
Didn't want the default Blogger NavBar.  Found a way to remove / hide it, but the whitespace reserved for it remained.

Incorrect IP address showing up in DNS

Problem
Windows 2003 server at a remote office has two network cards, one for general traffic and another one used with a network sniffer that was also loaded on the server if we need to track down a network hog issue.  The problem was that the NIC used for the sniffer auto-registered with DNS and sometimes would "advertise" that IP address and not the desired static IP address of the server.

Doing ASA Quality of Service (QOS) on DSL or Cable Internet

PROBLEM

Needed a way to help improve the QOS on our Cisco IP Phones (we use mainly 7940 / 7941 and 7960 / 7961 phones). On our WAN there is no problem as it is all controlled via our own routers and our VOIP provider's routers which we have direct T1's with.  Our Cisco Call Manager is hosted by a VOIP solution provider, the equipment is not at our site (not that it really matters). 

So the problems were at our small remote project sites which usually only have DSL or Cable Internet connections to the internet (not direct to our VOIP provider).  We know and fully understand that we really can't control QOS over the internet but the IP Phones have worked out pretty well in the past with out it.  However, recently these sites have been doing a lot more paperless work which is taking up a lot more outbound bandwidth because of scanning documents and uploading to a project web-site with a document repository.  Whenever someone was scanning documents (which uploaded to an off-site server) the phone quality went down the tubes.  This is mostly noticed by the person on the other (remote) end, not the employee at the project site.  

WHAT TO DO?

Recovering deleted items in Outlook

Information from Microsoft for recovering deleted items in Outlook.  The Exchange server must be configured to retain deleted items for a certain amount of time for this to work. 


By default, the Recover Deleted Items functionality is only enabled on the Deleted Items folder in a user's private folders. To enable the Recover Deleted Items functionality on mail folders other than the Deleted Items folder (for example, for the Sent Items, Drafts, Outbox and Inbox folders), make the following changes to the registry:

Purge email script for Exchange

Please note, I talk a lot about Sunbelt's Exchange Archiver below but this purge script could be used with other archive solutions or even without one, just as a purge.  Obviously you will want to take care that you don't purge valuable data.  The Exchange server I'm running this on is Exchange 2003.

PROBLEM
Implemented Sunbelt Exchange Archiver (SEA) but wanted more control over how emails were purged from the actual Exchange server.  I wanted specific policies for my user's Inbox, Sent Items, Deleted Items, and our Spam folder.  SEA removes emails from Exchange and leaves short-cuts or "stubs" which allows you to still open the emails, they just get retrieved from the archive server instead of Exchange.  I have SEA setup to remove the emails after 3 months leaving stubs, SEA has a global setting as to how long to keep these stubs in Exchange / Outlook.  I have SEA setup to keep these for 4 years but I really didn't want them hanging around for that long in certain folders.  I figure if the user takes the time to file the message in a folder, they can keep the stub for 4 years, otherwise if it is left in the Inbox or Deleted folder it shouldn't hang around as long.  Even though the stub isn't taking up that much space in Exchange, it can make Outlook run slow.  For example, say a user never files anything and keeps all emails in their inbox.  Their inbox may have say 30,000 items in it.  Okay, maybe the Exchange server is only holding the full emails for the last 3 months (in my case) it still has all these stubs to deal with and index.  When the user switches sort orders, Outlook has to work with all 30,000 items to rearrange the sort, making it very slow.  My thinking is that if it is over 1 year old and still in the Inbox they probably don't care about it any longer.  If they do need to find it, they can search for it in the Archive as it will still be there.

Here are my policies that I wanted to implement: